Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (30 page)

The British consul ordered her to leave Germany, but she replied that she did not need to as she had Hitler’s protection. Her father sent a series of desperate telegrams, but it was too late now for persuasion. Through the last days of August Unity was alone in her flat, whose previous owners had gone who knows where. She listened constantly to the wireless. On 1 September she lunched for the last time in the Osteria Bavaria. The next day she sent another letter to Diana, still in the familiar Mitford voice, saying that Chamberlain should be hanged. She expressed concern about her dog, a gift from her sister. ‘I fear,’ she wrote, ‘I shan’t see the Fuhrer again.’

The following day she put her gun to her head in the Englischer Garten.

PART III

‘And, you know now I am well again, I can’t bear life. I mean, this war!’

Letter from Unity Mitford to Diana Mosley, 20 November 1941

I

In fact Unity did see Hitler again, at a hospital in Munich. Her life was over, but she had failed to end it. The bullet from her little Walthur pistol lodged itself at the back of her head, in a position too precarious to allow its removal. It stayed there, playing upon her central nervous system, causing her to become wholly childlike in her moods, her lack of co-ordination and her incontinence. Yet somehow she remained very much herself. An exaggerated self, but that she always had been.

Whether it was guilt, affection, or both that caused Hitler to assume responsibility for Unity and pay for her treatment, it was something resembling human emotion. She was found almost immediately after dropping to the ground beside a park bench. So many people seem to have known that she intended harming herself, although none of them managed to prevent it. Rudi von Simolin, who on the morning of 4 September would receive a letter from Unity, explaining that she was now dead, had been shown the pistol. Deborah later wrote that the family also knew of its existence. To Tom and Diana, Unity had said that she would commit suicide if war was declared. On the morning of the 3rd she had visited the office of the gauleiter, Adolf Wagner, and asked whether she would be interned, to which he replied she would not; it is unclear why she wanted to know this, given her already fixed intentions. Wagner was concerned by her demeanour and put two men on her tail. Later she returned to his office and gave him an envelope containing a suicide note. Her shadows had temporarily lost her by that time, but a woman in the Englischer Garten heard the shot, and watched as Unity was driven away in an official vehicle. News of what had happened was suppressed, a state secret.

Hitler visited Unity on 10 September, when she did not recognize him, and again on 8 November. By this time she had tried again to commit suicide, by swallowing her swastika badge. But she now knew Hitler, and was able to understand when he asked whether she preferred to stay in Germany or return to England. ‘England,’ she said. He therefore began to make arrangements for her to be taken to neutral Switzerland, from where she might travel on to her home.

When war was declared, Unity’s parents were on their island with Nancy and Deborah. It was a similar situation to the one that they had endured two and a half years earlier, with Jessica’s disappearance. Different in the sense that they knew where this daughter was; but everything else was unknown, and terrifying. Through the British consul they received a letter from Unity: ‘This is to say goodbye... I send my best love to you all and particularly to my Boud.’ No real intelligence got through. There were stories of Unity’s arrest, of internment in a camp: ‘a sort of poetic justice’, as Nancy put it to Violet Hammersley. Nancy had travelled back to London on 3 September. On the way to the station she picked a quarrel with her mother about Hitler. Now that war had begun, her exasperation with the pro-German side of the family was ever more legitimate, yet there was also a sense in which she was relishing those discredited sympathies; she was surely justified in any antipathy towards a mother who liked Nazis. ‘Muv has finally gone off her head’, she wrote, not without a certain glee. She meant that Sydney was still supporting Hitler, which was true, although she could hardly fail to see that her mother was also delirious with anxiety. In fact Nancy would make efforts of her own to find out what had happened to Unity, about whom she too was deeply concerned, beneath her pose of detachment. Nevertheless she could not do the simple thing and offer sympathy to Sydney, and the unyielding quality in her mother did not make it any easier. Writing a letter of thanks for the stay at Inch Kenneth, Nancy went on to describe her immediate plunge into war work – she was driving an Air Raid Protection car every night, and soon would be working at a first-aid post near Paddington Station (where she began her 1940 novel
Pigeon Pie)
. The message to Sydney was pretty blatant:
some of us
are doing the honourable thing.

In mid-September, the Redesdales received a letter from Janos von Almasy’s brother, László.
¹
Unity, he wrote, was ill and in hospital. Another month on and they were told what they had surely already known, that she had tried to kill herself. By then the story was out.
The Times
reported in October: ‘News has reached Lord and Lady Redesdale that their daughter... is seriously ill in a hospital in Munich,’ but such restraint would not be typical. A journalist rang to ask if Unity was dead. Sydney hung up. Nevertheless a headline blaring her death made the newsstands. Jessica, now in Washington DC (where Esmond had a job as a door-to-door salesman), heard wild rumours: for example that Unity had been executed on Himmler’s orders. It was not until December 1939 that the Redesdales, back in London, were telephoned by Janos von Almasy. He passed the receiver to Unity, who was now in a clinic in Berne. She asked her parents to bring her home. At this point they still had little idea of her condition, although Almasy’s guarded manner must have been some sort of warning.

On 3 January 1940, it was reported that Unity was expected at Folkestone. Accordingly the press assembled, and something like a nightmare ensued.

Sydney and Deborah had travelled together to Berne. The clenching terror of seeing a person for the first time in hospital is always, fatally, underpinned by hope, but here it was instantly clear that there was none: Unity was alive, and that was all. She had been unable to bear anybody touching her head, and her scalp was dense with blood. Her face had collapsed into itself. Her teeth, never good, were orange. The early paralysis had worn off, however, and despite extreme vertigo she was able to walk. So the grim journey to Calais began, in an ambulance carriage attached to a train, which stopped and started continually. Every jolt sent a shot of agony into Unity’s head. The family spent two nights in a hotel, surrounded by journalists. The
Daily Express
offered £5,000 for an interview. The
Evening News
reported that the special carriage had been ‘supplied by Hitler’. Meanwhile David waited for three days at Folkestone, with no clue as to what he would find when he saw his daughter again.

‘Elaborate precautions were taken at the harbour,’
The Times
reported, in reference to an armed guard that stood on the dock. This would later be seized upon. For now, there were other issues. As Unity was taken from the boat on a stretcher, photographers crowded in: a picture shows her holding a blanket to a face that has become suddenly old, her eyes blank yet very sad, her hair prettily combed by her mother. The ambulance that drove the family away broke down immediately, so they were forced to return to Folkestone for another night; David’s suspicion of sabotage was surely correct. The car containing her luggage, fourteen pieces that had been searched at length at Calais, was also stopped by a puncture. The Redesdales, according to Nancy, had not handled it cleverly;
²
but how would they have known any other way? In all it took four days to take Unity from Berne to the cottage at High Wycombe, from where she moved to the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. There the family was told that she had been well looked after and there was nothing more to be done. Time would do its best or its worst.

In fact it did both: Unity would improve, but she would never recover. Newspaper reports, however – ‘Miss Mitford will probably return home in the near future in order to complete her convalescence’ – gave an impression of a minor disruption to a life of wholly undeserved privilege. So it is understandable that the public reaction was not kind. This, after all, was ‘the girl who loved Hitler’. Unity was already a familiar figure in the press; like a politician caught fiddling the till, she was a semi-joke – which the British love – but a joke in bad taste. When she appeared at events or marches in London, it was hot and delicious news. In 1938 she was attacked at Hyde Park Corner, where Stafford Cripps was making a speech, and gangs of Fascists and Communists began one of their usual dust-ups. Unity, who was by nature drawn to these explosions of violence, suddenly found herself its focus when her swastika was torn off. She retaliated; anti-Hitler chants began; she was attacked with punches and stones, and there was a threat to throw her in the Serpentine. Eventually a policeman and two other men shielded her on to a bus, which some of the crowd attempted to board. Such was her notoriety by this time: which she herself professed to enjoy.

Therefore when newsreel of Unity staggering from a stretcher, helped by her father, was shown in cinemas in January 1940, it was greeted with catcalls and abuse. It was said that the suicide attempt was a concocted story whereby she could evade arrest,
³
that vast sums had been spent on bringing her back to Britain. A ‘fake’ film was broadcast by Paramount News, a harsh satire in the modern vein, in which footage of Unity’s return was accompanied by a ribald commentary in verse and by mocking shots of aeroplanes flying overhead in formation. A letter to
The Times
, apparently from a disinterested correspondent, protested against this ‘degrading’ production. ‘They have spared no-one – even the tragic face of Lady Redesdale and close-ups of the girl herself are given, while the commentator makes unpleasant jokes.’ The question of this film – and the trickier problem of Unity herself – were raised in the House of Lords. The ‘elaborate precautions’ at Folkestone were criticized: why had an armed guard been posted? The reply was that the guard had been there anyway, which it may well have been, and that Lord Redesdale’s sole request had been for the local commandant to prevent reporters from questioning his daughter. This had been deemed reasonable, but it would later be alleged that men with ‘bayonets’ had come between the press and its prey. With regard to the Paramount News film, Lord Denman remarked: ‘To magnify the return of Miss Unity Mitford to this country into a matter of national importance, as this film seemed to do, was really absurd.’ As for the voiceover: ‘Considering the unhappy plight in which she returned home, to pour ridicule on her as was done in this commentary was... an unfair and ungenerous proceeding. The gibes at Lord Redesdale’s expense, with no pity for the anxiety he obviously felt, were uncalled for.’ These comments were backed by the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava: ‘as an example of sadistic brutality the Unity Mitford film would be hard to beat.’ And yes, one can imagine some of the reaction to this: those wretched toffs, that bunch of old Fascists, clubbing together the way that they always do. Unity, as so often, had presented a paradox. Was she more deserving of pity or opprobrium? In truth, it is still unanswerable.

In the Commons, Labour’s Herbert Morrison did not let up. He asked Neville Chamberlain to detail what steps the government had taken to facilitate ‘the return of this young lady to this country after she had been assisting the Nazi government’. The prime minister tried to bat him off, saying only that the US Embassy had been given a list of British subjects in Germany, including Unity, and asked to help them in any way it could. This was hardly damaging, but was so little to the point that it sounded evasive. In fact David had also had a guarantee from the Secretary of State for War that Unity would not be arrested on arrival in Britain. This was not mentioned.

Then Morrison went in for the kill. ‘If this had been a working-class person, would the same thing have been done?’ To which the answer is: probably not. Meanwhile Paramount News was also stoking the fires. In a letter to
The Times
, the company’s general manager wrote of widespread approbation for the film. Naturally. As Oswald Mosley had quite rightly perceived, a scapegoat is a very useful thing. Referring to the infamous armed guard, the letter also asked: ‘Why was Miss Mitford seemingly accorded military protection?’ That ‘seemingly’ was a get-out – the reason for the guard’s presence was unclear, however bad it looked – but the letter continued, relentless in its semi-hypocritical rectitude: ‘Neutral observers might have deduced that the British persons most dear to the official mind are those who reserve their deepest admiration for Hitler.’

Parliamentary questions about Unity continued into March, when the Redesdales attempted to take her to their home at Inch Kenneth. These remote islands were part of a prohibited area, and in the House it was asked why she had been allowed to enter it. ‘Is the Home Secretary aware,’ came a further question in July, this time from a Scottish MP, ‘that as late as June 2nd Miss Mitford was met by her father at Oban and taken to that island, and that in Scotland we are concerned as to how well-known Fascists [note the plural] can live in these islands while perfectly loyal people cannot visit their relatives?’ Again, this was an understandable grievance, and it was reasonable that Unity should be forbidden this particular freedom. In fact the other Fascist banned from Inch Kenneth was Sydney, although from the wording of the question it would appear to be David. But he, having ‘recanted like Latimer’ (Nancy’s phrase), was not deemed a security risk, which did not convince those who saw him as ‘an old Nazi baron’ (Esmond Romilly’s phrase).